Plenty of evidence has shown that ambient sounds can be very beneficial when trying to work or sleep. Having that background noise can, oddly, be more soothing than silence, giving you a Zen-like experience. Soundrown is an app that makes it easy to arrange such sounds and, in theory, help you sleep and work so much better than before.

It takes seconds to set up. Consisting of one sole screen, you’re tasked with choosing sounds relating to the beach, birdsong, a creek, rain, a campfire, and a coffee shop. Tap on one and you can use a bar to gradually adjust how loud and dominant it is. That means you can combine a few of them together if you want, choosing to adjust accordingly so that one is more distinctive than the others.

Most work quite well together too, conjuring up the idea of a babbling creek while it’s raining, although admittedly I found the coffee shop sounds don’t work that well alongside anything else. Something more outdoorsy would have suited the purposes of this app, but maybe that comes down to a matter of taste and what sounds are most relaxing to you.

In each case, the background of the app changes according to the sounds you’ve chosen, although the color scheme isn’t entirely memorable by any means.

Alongside that, Soundrown offers a sleep timer functionality, meaning you can set the app to run for however long you require, before in theory you fall asleep to the dulcet tones. Again, it’s simple to set up, taking seconds to arrange.

That’s the beauty behind Soundrown. You can set it up before bed without feeling stressed out during such important moments of downtime. It doesn’t take long to adjust things, although you will probably end up wishing that there was a way of creating presets. Consistency often works well in these cases, and Soundrown doesn’t allow for that just yet. Still, as a soothing aid it could make all the difference to your mental wellbeing.

Review disclosure: note that the product reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note that if the developer provides the product or not, this does not impact the review or score.